The Ministry of Education (MOE) should waive its right to appeal the Taipei High Administrative Court ruling on Thursday last week, after the ruling threw into doubt the legitimacy of the ministry’s revisions to the high-school curriculum for Chinese language and social science. The ministry should drop its plan for new textbooks to be introduced in August and go back to the drawing board.
The Taiwan Association of Human Rights filed suit a year ago to demand that the ministry observe Article 9 of the Freedom of Government Information Act (政府資訊公開法) and make public all information about the meetings in which the new curriculum guidelines were decided upon.
The association, along with many other groups, said the new China-centered and Han-centered historical perspective of the guidelines was an attempt to stifle the development of Taiwanese identity.
The ministry has tried to downplay the seriousness of the ruling. In its initial response, it said that the ruling “held no bearing” on its schedule that the textbooks for this year’s summer semester should conform to the new curriculum guidelines. It insisted that the information about the meeting discussions, which it said was “for internal use or preparatory work prior to decisionmaking,” should be restricted from the public — one of the exceptions to Article 9 allowed under Article 18 of the act.
The ministry’s stance was nothing but sophistry. Although the lawsuit ruling was not directly about the actual adjustments made to the guidelines, but about the procedure by which the revisions were made, without due process as their basis, the legitimacy of the new curriculum guidelines is untenable.
The nature of the information can in no way justify the ministry’s opaque review process.
There have been leaks that revealed that last year’s review had been conducted in an unorthodox manner, with the curriculum proposals coming from an ad hoc committee, as opposed the usual practice of consulting high-school teachers before such a review commences.
The 10 members of the ad hoc committee are known for their pro-unification stance and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) connections. None was a historian with knowledge of Taiwan’s history.
The latest leaks said the committee proposed the guideline changes on Nov. 23, 2013 — when high-school teachers were still being consulted as to whether it was necessary to conduct a review — and set a closing date for the consultations of Dec. 31.
In just two weeks’ time, the committee rammed the proposal through four more steps to complete the review procedure, which critics later found to be murky, shambolic and non-inclusive to other opinions. The proposed changes sparked a widespread outcry at the time, but the ministry went ahead and promulgated the new guidelines on Feb. 10 last year.
Those adjustments were simply the latest in a series of attempts made by President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration since May 2008 to change textbooks from a Taiwan-oriented perspective to a China-oriented perspective. Several previous attempts — including a proposal to increase the portion of ancient Chinese in Chinese language textbooks, to merge Taiwanese and Chinese history textbooks and to refer to the nation as the “Republic of China” instead of “Taiwan” and to China as “the mainland” — were all called off because of intense public opposition.
Whether or not the ministry appeals the ruling, the likelihood of it complying with the ruling is low. The Ma administration has been drafting general curriculum guidelines for the entire 12-year system to replace the ones currently in use. If the administration made public how it handled the changes to the high-school Chinese language and social science guidelines, it would only promote a greater backlash against its plan to overhaul the entire system.
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers